The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

shaking hands and maintaining eye contact isn't necessarily worse than the alternatives, if the technology is based in sound theory

It's consistently worse. It's the same thing as a college degree these days. You're expected to do it precisely because it's worthless. The expectation didn't shift to think "this isn't informative", but "anything below this line must somehow be even worse"

not actually sure it isn't informative

It tells people you reason conventionally, respond to incentives conventionally, and have the same predictable fallacies as others (sunk cost for instance). This is useful but it shouldn't be foundational when you are trying to select principally for capacity to do things.

convention is institutional- it tells people that you can operate inside institutional contexts, a valuable piece of information

Yes, but "operating inside institutions" can mean treading social water and not doing anything very easily. And evidence for one thing is not necessarily evidence against another, so people who haven't been to college might still be able to operate in those contexts.

yeah, i rely on jamming cultural expectations i live in a trailer, a social signal not conducive to successfully operating inside institutions but at least i can learn to give a good handshake (and since i'm autistic, i can learn to give an *astronomical* handshake)

Neurotypical bullshit is quicksand though. If you can get in, do your shit, and get out before some byzantine social misinterpretation happens then yeah, you can fake things. But youll never be able to build a model to match their instinctive bs without the damocles sword falling